Federal judges have rejected nearly a dozen cases brought by President Donald Trump’s hand-picked top prosecutor in Washington, D.C., after finding they were based on unconstitutional police stops.
U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office has decided to prosecute nearly every single arrest from last year’s surge of National Guard members to the nation’s capital, which Trump touted as a way to put dangerous criminals behind bars.
But the Department of Justice has been forced to drop scores of illegal gun possession cases that Pirro’s office should have flagged from the beginning as too weak to prosecute, legal insiders told CNN.
Some of the cases have been dropped or dismissed after months of briefings and hearings, wasting valuable time and resources on meritless cases, and hurting the U.S. Attorney’s Office’s credibility in the eyes of the federal judiciary.
“You have to have people willing to exercise restraint and say, ‘This is a garbage case,’” a former prosecutor told CNN.
Legal insiders previously warned that, besides the judges, Pirro has also “lost the jury pool” in D.C. by bringing politically motivated cases against the president’s enemies.
Pirro defended her team’s record, telling the network earlier this week, “Look, crime is at a historic low. You can’t criticize this office.”
The former New York county judge and Fox News host also said that when it comes to Trump’s surge, she’s “willing to take cases that are close calls to protect the community, even though that does not mean a judge will always agree with us.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out for comment.
But the former prosecutor, who focused on gun possession, told CNN that the goals of policing and prosecution were different.
Police need to be focused on public safety and might make a bad stop that nevertheless gets an illegal weapon off the streets. That doesn’t mean a prosecutor should waste their time on a bad case.
In one case, a swarm of federal officers canvassing the streets surrounded a man’s car because he was double-parked, then searched the car without having a valid legal reason to do so, the judge in the case found.
Officers found an illegal handgun, but since the search was illegal, the evidence could not be presented in court, effectively ending the case.
In another case, a law enforcement officer stopped a man who was jaywalking in downtown D.C. while eating ice cream.
The officer, who had never done a jaywalking stop before, checked the man’s ID and noticed he was under court supervision from a prior case, and that he was carrying small bags of marijuana, which is legal in DC.
The police then grabbed the man’s satchel and found a gun inside, but since the marijuana was legal, the officer didn’t have probable cause to search the bag, the judge ruled.
Once again, the evidence of the search had to be thrown out under Supreme Court precedent interpreting the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures.
Before Pirro took over, the U.S. Attorney’s Office used a data-driven approach to determine which cases were sound enough to charge, and prosecutors maintained close, long-standing contacts with the city’s detectives to help train officers on proper stops and searches, CNN reported.
But the office has been purged of experienced prosecutors through firings and resignations, with the team of prosecutors working on federal major crimes, including gun and drug cases, shrinking to half of what it was before Trump took office.
The remaining attorneys, who are generally less experienced and have fewer prosecutors to mentor them, are facing a heavier workload thanks to Trump’s surge, CNN reported.
